Learning from Abroad: The Role of Policy Transfer in Contemporary Policy‐Making

“As such, this article pays less attention to sociological arguments explaining the selection process of policy instruments (Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000; Hall, 1993).”

“In an effort to close their legitimacy gap, authoritarian regimes have increasingly imitated democracies and the social media messaging utilized by democratic states (see Dobbin, Simmons, and Garrett 2007; Dolowitz and Marsh 1996, 2000; Gilardi 2010; Lemon and Antonov 2020).”

“…organizations have launched their documents around the same time, there has been a lot of cross-national and cross-organizational policy learning (Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000), which has led to some convergence in terms of the key themes and principles but also important divergence in terms of…”

“The study employs an adapted version of the analytical scheme proposed by Dolowitz and Marsh (2000), identifying: (1) the main motivations, on both sides, for the policy transfer between the EU and China and the EU and Brazil: (2) the types of actors involved; (3) the scope of the transfer, i.e.,…”

“For followers interested in drawing lessons, a critical evaluation of the fit between domestic policy objectives and foreign models is necessary to avoid transfer-related policy failure (Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000; Pegels, 2014, p. 184).”

“Implementation can be framed, studied and analysed in many different ways (Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000; Peterson, 2001; Hill & Hupe, 2009) by different scientific traditions.”

“These literatures also help to clarify the object of transfer by distinguishing between policy goals, content and instruments (Dolowitz & Marsh 2000).”

“(Rose 1991, 1993, Dolowitz and Marsh 1996, 2000, Dolowitz et al. 2000).”

“In practice, the learning and transfer literature suggests that governments seek lessons unsystematically and only from a small number of countries (Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000; Dunlop & Radaelli, 2013).”

“…as a process ‘by which knowledge about policies, administrative arrangements, institutions and ideas in one political system (past or present) is used in the development of policies, administrative arrangements, institutions and ideas in another political system’ (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000: 5).”

“In order to work with more realistic assumptions on policy transfer, we turn to Dolowitz and Marsh (1996, 2000), who identify complexity of the policy landscape, insufficient information about policy content, lack of insight into the success of the policy, and differences between the economic,…”

“The second category of implication is to consider the features and artefacts of the case study – the 10 findings identified by more than one evaluation method – may be treated as exemplars and potential candidates for policy transfer (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000).”

“However, it should be remembered that policy borrowing and transfer may not always strictly be viewed as voluntary or coercive; policy borrowing and transfer can be a mixture of both ‘voluntary decisions and coercive pressures’ (Dolowitz and Marsh 2000).”

“In this sense, the research undertaken comes closer to research produced by scholars working on institutional and policy transfer (Dolowitz and Marsh 2000; Bulmer and Padgett 2004).”

“…crucial to its effectiveness in its home country; or • the transfer is inappropriate because ‘insufficient attention [is] . . . paid to the differences between the economic, social, political and ideological contexts in the transferring and the borrowing country’ (Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000, p. 17).”

“Finally, “policy transfer” (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000) across jurisdictions also matters.”

“…combined with the current paradigm of external development assistance from entities that seek to “enforce similar policies across diverse countries” (Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000, p.7) continue to create both implicit and explicit pressure on recently established governments to pursue standardized…”

“Political scientists emphasize the institutions, governance structures, ideologies and agents that lead to the diffusion of certain ideas (Dolowitz and Marsh 2000; Evans 2004).”

“Em outro cenário, ondas de difusão não coordenadas implicam um menor grau de interconexão entre governos (Ikenberry 1990; Bennett 1991; Dolowitz & Marsh 2000).”

“Frequent diagnoses of urban crises, accelerated since 2008 (Blanco et al., 2014; Harvey, 2010; Soureli and Youn, 2009), have increased both potential policy transfers (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000: 17) and the demand for quick solutions and, thus, advice.”

“In doing so, RI acts as a bridge between member states’ needs and capacities in a specific policy area, catalysing the voluntary internalization of policy and institutional innovations through the horizontal diffusion mechanism of lesson-drawing: a goal-oriented type of learning driven by FN, whereby policy-makers dra…”

“Similarly, those such as Dolowitz and Marsh (1996, 2000), Bissessar (2002), and Evans (2004), have explained policy decision making and outcome from a policy transfer perspective, while Rose (1993) contends that policy decisions and outcomes occur as a result of lessons that are drawn from other…”

“…in which knowledge about policies, administrative arrangements, institutions and ideas in one political setting [… ] is used in the development of [the same] in another political setting’ (Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000, p. 5; for an overview of the differences between the sub-strands, see Stone, 2012).”

“The ideas can come from abroad in terms of policy transfer (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000), that is, when knowledge about particular policy instruments, institutional arrangements and so on from another higher education system is deliberately and voluntarily used by domestic policy actors.”

“…approach (Dot-Pouillard 2007).13 This discussion about the potential relationship between the French and the Quebec debates on secularism and minorities points to what is known as “policy transfer,” which is partly about how policy ideas travel from one country to another (Dolowitz and Marsh 2000).”

“Interactive social research or action research approaches, based on the interaction between social subjects (Todhunter, 2001) and collaborative policy learning procedures (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000; Rose 1991; Stone, 2003), are generally favourable for stimulating stakeholders to cooperate in knowledge gathering.”

“However, those contributors, and many others given that the two articles by Dolowitz and Marsh (1996, 2000) have attracted more than 2000 citations, still find the concept useful and would argue that there is little that McCann and Ward offer which cannot already be found within the generic concept…”

“Deeper questions asked include (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000: 7): Do different actors get involved at different stages of the policy transfer process?”

“Mechanisms of policy adoption Dolowitz and Marsh (2000) define policy transfer as ‘ a process in which knowledge about policies, administrative arrangements, institutions, and ideas in one political setting is used in the development of policies, administrative arrangements, institutions and ideas…”

“…transfer process, including ‘selected officials, political parties, bureaucrats/civil servants, pressure groups, policy entrepreneurs and experts, transnational corporations, think tanks, supra-national governmental and nongovernmental institutions and consultants’ (Dolowitz and Marsh 2000, 10).”

“] are increasingly playing a role in the spread of ideas, programs and institutions around the globe” [56] (p.”

“In some cases it is a matter of coercive policy transfer (Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000; Hadjiisky, Pal, & Walker, 2017) through the governance programs of bilateral agencies and international organizations like the World Bank (Andrews, 2011, 2013; Pritchett, Woolcock, & Andrews, 2012).”

“…as a benign or neutral process, whereby ‘knowledge about policies, administrative arrangements and ideas in one political system (past or present) is used in the development of policies’ administrative arrangements, institutions and ideas in another political system’ (Dolowitz and Marsh 2000: 5).”

“…whether the sponsorship of a specific MS dual VET training model as a model of best practice is evident in other EU’s soft power mechanism, as conferences, subsidies, contests, agencies (Dimitrova et al., 2016; Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000) or in the European Alliance of Apprenticeships activities.”

“Policy influence and policy transfer are some of the emerging but dominant paradigms in public policy literature (Dolowitz and Marsh 2000).”

“However, it also remains crucial to highlight that the size and scale of the Olympics naturally complicate the prospects of “ policy-transfer ” (Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000) of existing knowledge-based templates or policies that commonly inform or assist the Olympic planning and delivery (Coa ff ee,…”

“Voluntary transfer, direct coercive or negotiated transfer, and indirect coercive transfer are major forms of policy transfer established in some of the earliest literature on policy transfer [23,31,34].”

“With regard to the four possible output degrees – copying, emulation, combination and inspiration (Dolowitz and Marsh 2000, 13) – no direct copying was found, as could be expected.”

“policy learning and transfer based on specific cases ( Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000 ).”

“Since the mid-1970s, the EU has provided an additional arena in which struggle over tobacco control policy has occurred, with quasi-federal practices of shared sovereignty and potential for policy transfer either coercively or voluntarily (Asare et al. 2009; Dolowitz and Marsh 2000; Princen 2009).”

“A risk here is inappropriate transfer (Dolowitz and Marsh 2000), such as in the transfer of Ecotrans to Greece, where contextual factors, not only in terms of organization of the public sector, but also societal interest in the environment, meant that the policy transfer was unsuccessful (Ladi…”

“There is a rich corpus of literature about the circulation of policies, which includes diffusion, transfer, translation, convergence, lesson drawing and others (e.g. Hadjiisky et al. 2017; Peck and Theodore 2015; Porto de Oliveira 2017; Dolowitz and Marsh 2000; Newmark 2002).”

“Policy learning scholars will also be familiar with some classic works which relate to ‘ lesson-drawing ’ (Rose, 1991), ‘ policy transfer ’ (Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000) and ‘ policy di ff usion ’ (Shipan & Volden, 2012).”

“We share the central concern of many of these authors related to the way that various “international governing organizations . . . are increasingly playing a role in the spread of ideas, programs and institutions around the globe” (Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000, p. 11).”